What Can Quaker Colleges Do for Quakerism? What Can Quakerism Do for Quaker Colleges?

[FAHE Office]

Below are notes from a conversation led by Doug Bennett, retiring
president of Earlham College on Friday, June 17, 2011 at the FAHE
conference.

This session generated two very different lists: the first, what can/
should/ought Quaker colleges do for the wider world of Quakers; the
second, what can/should/ought the wider world of Quakerism do for
Quaker colleges. (My apologies to anyone who was in the session and
whose contributions I may have hopelessly garbled here…)
College → Quakerism
• Hire Quaker faculty when possible
• Provide an intentional and focused spiritual and intellectual
support and personal development community for young adults (as well
as faculty and the “Quaker curious”) who will one day contribute ot
the Religious Society of Friends
• Provide Quaker mentors to non-Quaker faculty
• Have students attend a variety of local meetings
• Record their (the college’s) thinking
• Facilitate student inter-visitation with other Quaker campuses
• Fully develop and articulate to the public the connection between
the values of Quakerism and the values of the college
• Preserve the core values/identity of a Friends institution
• Be a place that supports questions and genuine consideration
• Teach Quaker faith, practice, mysticism/spirituality, discernment,
and consensus
• Outreach to the student body through worship
• Maintain records and archives
• Educate students and faculty on the Peace Testimony
• Articulate the college’s mission and provide reminders of the core
Quaker values that are the basis of that mission
• Be an example, a pattern
• Embrace openness and change
• Active awareness of continued growth, not just heritage
• Support exploration pushing the boundaries of Quakerism
Quakerism → College
• Be open and connected to Quaker values
• Share as is useful Quaker practices
• Provide a lens for a vision of the world
• More Quakers on the Board of Trustees
• Encourage and mentor students and provide financial support for
resources, mentors, opportunities, speakers, and consultants
• Provide the ethical framework for the testimonies so that the
testimonies can be shared more effectively with students
• Coach consensus
• Appreciate people and their gifts
• Lend support and enhance visibility
• Be present to students, have a presence on campus throughout the
year at all times
• Be open to the prophetic voices that come out of colleges
• Appreciate difference/diversity and support enhancing pedagogy
• Provide an example/model
• Provide consistent structure to live out values
• Make F(f)riends
• $ $
• Be intentional in bridging the gap between graduation and early
adulthood
• Ground the college in deeper pursuits beyond the current academic
trend
• Be open to ways that non-Quakers can teach Quakers
• Bring the Quaker point of view to social outreach
• Provide grounding
It could be that each side spends too much time feeling rancorous
about what it EXPECTS (but doesn’t necessarily get) from the other,
instead of focusing on what it can GIVE to the other.
Something to keep in mind for the future: more than half of the
Quakers in the world are non-Anglic, but the culture of Quakerism is
still Anglic. May colleges, as places where people are used to
thinking and working internationally, can be the ones who help to
facilitate that culture shift. If the culture doesn’t SHIFT, it will
SPLIT.
A lot of questions…not many answers…but still a VERY good discussion!